Inventions according to Patent Literatures 1 and 2 relate to driving support apparatuses for supporting driving of vehicles.
A driving support apparatus as described in Patent Literature 1 detects information on driving maneuvers with respect to components such as a steering wheel, an accelerator, a brake, and a blinker, and calculates a distribution of the detected information as behavior information of a driver. Furthermore, the driving support apparatus extracts, as a travel situation, from a position of the vehicle and map data, the type, width or shape of a road near the vehicle, the position of an intersection, the position and type of a traffic light or road sign, a mark drawn on a road, such as a crosswalk or a stop line. The driving support apparatus further selects a distribution that serves as a reference for determining whether the driver is safely driving on the basis of the extracted traveling situation, and determines whether the driver is safely driving on the basis of the difference between the behavior information and a reference distribution.
Moreover, the driving support apparatus stores behavior information of the driver as a history for each travel situation, searches for behavior information in a situation similar to a travel situation in a traveling direction, from the history, and when the found behavior information is determined to be not carrying out safe driving or has less frequency of safely driving, notifies the driver to perform safe driving.
A driving support apparatus as described in Patent Literature 2 includes: travel state detecting means for detecting a travel state of a host vehicle; surrounding condition detecting means for detecting a situation surrounding the host vehicle; acceleration/deceleration operation detecting means for detecting an acceleration or deceleration operation on the host vehicle; driving characteristic grasping means for grasping driving characteristics by classifying a relation between the travel state of the host vehicle and the situation surrounding the host vehicle in the case where the acceleration or deceleration operation is detected by the acceleration/deceleration operation detecting means and the situation surrounding the host vehicle, into a plurality of element characteristics; and driving support means for providing driving support to a driver on the basis of at least one of the element characteristics in the driving characteristics grasped by the driving characteristic grasping means.
The driving characteristic grasping means holds the plurality of element characteristics, and, from among the plurality of held element characteristics, selects an element characteristic most approximating a relation between the travel state of the host vehicle and the situation surrounding the host vehicle when the acceleration or deceleration operation is detected by the acceleration/deceleration operation detecting means. The driving characteristic grasping means classifies each relation between a travel state of the host vehicle and a situation surrounding the host vehicle in the case where the acceleration or deceleration operation has been detected in past driving, into a plurality of groups, according to the degree of similarity therebetween, and measures a characteristic of each of the groups, thereby obtaining the plurality of element characteristics. The driving support means carries out driving support for the driver on the basis of the element characteristics measured by the driving characteristic grasping means.